Speculative Fiction—an all-encompassing genre created to describe stories of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and other stories that have an element of “What if...” in them. A story in speculative fiction is one that adds an element of the unreal, or asks, what would become of our society if history took a different direction at some important event? Fiction with a little something extra thrown in.—William D. Richards

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Monday, March 20, 2017

2184: Beneath the Steel City, Book 1 by Ben Lovejoy

Release date: March 16, 2017

Subgenre: Dystopian fiction

About 2184: Beneath the Steel City:

In London 2184, the government monitors every move its citizens make,
logs every action, notes every visit, supervises every communication,
penalises the slightest transgression with all the warmth and sympathy
of a hungry piranha.

Computer tech David Lafferty has grown tired
of living beneath the crushing weight of a billion petty rules, and
decided it was time to create his own rules in an underground life
beneath the steel city. Aided by Saira, a Self-propelled Artificially
Intelligent Robot Assistant, and a small circuit board stolen from the
government, all is going well until an unknown adversary appears to have
learned his every secret…

Excerpt:

Robots are dumb. Actually, that’s unfair, Saira isn’t dumb at all –
as Self-propelled Artificially Intelligent Robot Assistants go,
she’s pretty smart. But they are very literal when it comes to
behaving the way they’ve been programmed to behave. Which is
problematic when they’ve been programmed to obey the law and you
would very much like one not to.

I’d planned for her to remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that
I was here without invitation. I’d had the door codes, the keycard
pass loaded onto my pocket terminal, the fingerprints. Not my own
fingerprints, obviously, but latex moulds good enough to persuade
the entry system that they were real, and that was almost the same
thing.

At each of the three security doors through which we’d passed, I’d
sauntered up to them with the air of a man very much going about
his lawful business, his robot companion at his side, and then
breezed through them without so much as the flicker of an amber
light. All I needed Saira to do was plug herself into the access
port of the safe door – the final barrier between me and my prize –
and transmit the 256-character authorisation code.

The code would be accepted. My possession of the previous
generation of this chip guaranteed that. What I hadn’t counted on
was the automatic verbal warning system triggered by Saira plugging
herself into the communications port.

“Attention!” it had said, in that imperious way government systems
always spoke to citizens and their electronic companions. “Only
duly authorised robots are permitted to interface with this system.
Please verify the credentials of the person under whose authority
you are operating before proceeding by requesting sight of their
government employee access pass, grade Alpha Four or above. Removal
of any property from the safe without lawful authority would be
theft.”

Saira paused, and a countdown timer next to the access port began
doing what countdown timers do. I wasn’t exactly sure what would
happen when the timer reached zero, but I was fairly certain I
wasn’t going to like it. Right now, it was reading one minute and
thirty seconds.

“It’s ok,” I said, in what I very much hoped was a reassuring tone.
“I wouldn’t have been able to get us into the facility without the
correct pass. You may proceed.” One minute twenty-five seconds.

It was a logical-sounding argument, I thought. Saira had seen me
use a keycard pass to unlock one of the security doors. That
should, I felt, be sufficient. I was wrong.

“I am required to perform sight verification of the pass,” she
replied. This was problematic because, while my keycard coding was
correct in every detail, and the on-screen visual resemblance
good enough to fool a fellow human, my failure to anticipate the
possibility of Saira being required to inspect the pass had left it
without the embedded microdot coding that would verify my specific
access rights.

I dislike unexpected problems. I especially dislike unexpected
problems arising at inconvenient times – and that countdown timer
suggested to me that we were now one minute and twenty-one seconds
away from a time which would qualify as such.

Free from March 20 to March 24!

About Ben Lovejoy:

Ben Lovejoy is a tech writer turned novelist. His first published
novel was 11/9, a page-turning technothriller about terrorists planning
an attack bigger than 9/11. This was followed by The Billion Dollar
Heist, a team of loveable rogues with a crazy plan to steal a billion
dollars in cash.

Ben has also written a rom-com, Dated, which he
denies is based on real events, and a non-fiction travel guide, The
Gentle Art of Travel.

His latest work is 2184, a 13,500-word short introducing the Beneath the Steel City series of SF novellas.

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